Notes ( from here) on recent emigration from Cuba:

A stunning 10% of Cuba’s population — more than a million people — left the island between 2022 and 2023, the head of the country’s national statistics office said during a National Assembly session Friday, the largest migration wave in Cuban history.

According to the official figures made public for the first time, Cuba’s population went from 11,181,595 on Dec. 31, 2021, to 10,055,968 on December 2023. The emigration of 1,011,269 Cubans was the main factor contributing to a massive fall in Cuba’s population by the end of 2023, when the population stood at a number similar to what it was in 1985, said Juan Carlos Alfonso Fraga, the head of the National Statistics and Information Office. Other factors were a high number of deaths, 405,512, and a low birth rate, with only 284,892 children born in that period.

Of the million-plus people who left the island between 2022 and 2023, about 800,000 were between the ages of 15 and 59, which, combined with the island’s increasingly older population, would significantly affect the labor force, the cost of social programs and the sustainability of social security.

It appears that the large majority of those leaving have and are attempting to enter into the U.S. through the humanitarian parole program created by the Biden Administration for residents of Cuba and three other countries, two of which – Nicaragua and Venezuela – the U.S. has imposed economic sanctions on.

Food production has collapsed in the country. Alexis Rodríguez Pérez, a senior official at the Ministry of Agriculture, said the country produced 15,200 tons of beef in the first six months of this year. As a comparison, Cuba produced 172,300 tons of beef in 2022, already down 40% from 289,100 in 1989.